Saturday, 25 July 2009

25 July 2009 - Run down to Meneou and back

16 nautical miles

The forecast was interesting. One forecast said winds from north/northwest in the morning dying off at mid-day to nothing in the afternoon and the other said at mid-day the winds would turn and be southerly. As it happened the second forecast was correct. This made for a very interesting sail. We had downwind runs and broad reaches down to Meneou and a broad reach and downwind run back to the club.

I was taking out friends of mine, Brian and Ruth with their son Oliver. John, a colleague, went with Tim in his trimaran. I had an extra 5 litres of fuel for the outboard so that had the former forecast been correct we could have motored back, towing Tim.

We all started out quite well, enjoying the sail, but the winds were low and because we were mostly running it was a bit difficult for new sailors to helm. Mind you I accidentally gybed a couple of times myself on runs. Tim had suggested a route closer to the shore to pick up the shore winds. It helped a little but meant we were gybing from broad reach to broad reach all the time. Not a bad exercise I guess, since its not something we do very often.

The motion of the boat was strange on these runs, rolling quite a bit in the very gentle swell, which is not the best for people liable to seasickness and sadly Ruth succumbed, and when we got to Meneou Brian and Ruth jumped ship and took a car back to Larnaca!

We sat down in Meneou and I had a frappe and Tim and John had english breakfast. The first english breakfast John had in his life and he was staggered at the sausage, bacon, two eggs, fried bread, toast and beans... he claims he will not need to eat for the rest of the day!

Then the wind turned. As we sat watching the flags dropped to no wind and then picked up 180 degrees from the original direction. A quick race out to Galini to move her buoy since she had swung round onto the beach. Good job Andreas was not watching, he would have been appalled since anchoring in the Day Skipper course is supposed to teach you not to get into that difficulty!

Finally its time to sail back. Oh no... now there are swimmers in the way, and a powerboat dropping people off... which means I do a somewhat inelegant take off from the beach and tear my swimming trunks in the process.

Oli and I sail back. It gets hotter and hotter. As we sail we eat all the lunches... I had brought lunch for John and we no longer had Brian and Ruth with us. Amazing what a 13 year old boy can eat. Well... actually we didn't quite manage to eat 5 lunches, but we had a pretty good try!

It gets hotter and hotter still, by now I am helming as we are on a downwind run. The suntan lotion I had put on my forehead [I had burnt it on Friday morning so was being extra careful] managed to melt and drip into my eyes. We have no towel on board. Boy, does suntan lotion in the eyes sting!

Goose-wing running most of the way back was a bit of a roll, roll, roll, ride, so it was a good thing Ruth did jump ship as she would not have enjoyed the sail back.

Tim calls up on the radio reckoning we should have a fast run back, but the GPS reckons about 2 hours. The GPS is correct!

I have bought Admiralty charts for the area now and so were following our route on the chart. Interesting to see how it correlates to being out there. There seem to be quite a lot of discrepancies with the charts for our area, I think I will have to log the changes. Anyhow... so can you work out how I put the GPS plot onto the chart? No, I didn't do it by hand.